70th Street

The Russia House, 1989

Perhaps inevitably, after his decade-long tear of producing major works, culminating in the crowning achievement of A Perfect Spy in 1986, John Le Carre finally eased up some, publishing the slighter Russia House in 1989.

It’s not entirely fair, however, to call The Russia House “slight,” or to characterize it, as some reviewers did, as being more along the lines of one of Graham Greene’s “entertainments.” The Russia House only pales against the bright lights of its predecessors. Taken on its own it is an intelligent, sophisticated novel with the moral ambiguity, thematic complexity and depth of characterization expected from Le Carre.

The plot is one of Le Carre’s most straightforward and, especially for the average reader, immediately intelligible. In the character of Barley Blair Le Carre creates another unwilling recruit into the world of espionage. Like Charlie in The Little Drummer Girl, Blair discovers he has an aptitude for the game, but not the heart. Unlike Charlie, Blair is ultimately able to exert his own agency to defy his handlers and follow his own unambiguous moral compass. He is one of Le Carre’s unquestionably heroic characters and the book even has something of a happy ending. Or at least as happy as can be expected in Le Carre’s world.

In A Perfect Spy, Le Carre mastered a complicated narrative structure of shifting narrators, perspectives and time frames. With The Russia House that mastery is subtly apparent in the more relaxed novel. Narrated by Palfrey, an important side character, the narrative easily shifts from the first-person to the third, with even a brief stop here and there into the second. These changes shade into one another with ease, the transitions nearly invisible. This is what it reads like when a master novelist applies his skill with a light, but no less adept, touch.

One of Le Carre’s greatest strengths is the depth of travel and research he undertakes to ensure a transparent authenticity of place in his novels. (His 1993 introduction to The Little Drummer Girl describing some of his encounters while researching that novel is almost as thrilling as the book itself.) In The Russia House, the reader is vividly taken into the Soviet Union during the early days of perestroika in the mid-1980s. This is especially fascinating for readers who came of age during that time, when Russia was still a mysterious and largely unknown country slowly emerging into the known western world. Le Carre’s portrait feels lived-in and real, and even in its down-at-heel banality, it is endlessly compelling.

The Russia House capped another excellent decade for Le Carre--the third in a row. Readers may have wondered what was next: he’d apparently written his masterpiece, and was it possible he’d said all he had to say about the Cold War, which was winding down, anyway? The Russia House, appropriately enough, was published the same year the Berlin Wall came down, and could have been an elegant cap to Le Carre’s great literary project. But, as it turned out, the end of the Cold War only expanded Le Carre’s field of enquiry (as he’d already shown in The Little Drummer Girl). What was to follow next was his most prolific decade yet.

A Perfect Spy, 1986

To say that Le Carre was on a roll by 1986 is something of an understatement. From the Karla trilogy, to The Little Drummer Girl, to this--still considered by many to be his finest work.

Nor is this a revisionist reappraisal of a title overlooked or unappreciated at publication. A Perfect Spy was immediately recognized as a major work--Philip Roth deemed it the “best English novel since the war.” Critics and reviewers were impressed by the depth and complexity of the narrative and plot, and the way Le Carre drew together the themes and characterizations of his then two-decade writing career into, it must have seemed at the time, his crowning achievement.

Perhaps it still is. This project’s verdict is necessarily still out on that, but it is remarkably evident, even with twelve titles still forthcoming, that this is certainly a masterpiece, an utterly remarkable book which is difficult to overpraise. What the critics have said is correct--the depth and complexity of the plot, the narrative structure, the thematic architecture and the characterizations place this novel in the top tier of literature.

This is also Le Carre’s most personal novel-- much of the childhood of protagonist Magnus Pym is based on Le Carre’s own. Le Carre, and Pym, grew up with fathers who were professional con men and grifters, and the accounts in A Perfect Spy of the schemes and turmoils such a life necessitates are told with richness and veracity, veering from comic to harrowing and always laced through with the nuanced sense of childhood’s tragic uncovering of the true nature of the parent. Le Carre managed to escape into a productive career, channeling the traumas and disappointments of his youth into literature. With Magnus Pym, he imagines another path and darker consequences that could have come.

Along with the scenes of childhood, Pym’s early experiences with espionage in post-war Europe are some of Le Carre’s finest writing. Likely because of Le Carre’s deep attachment to the material, the scenes and tableaus are infused with such emotion and mood that even if specific incidents cannot be fully recalled, scenes remain unforgettable.

All of Le Carre’s novels are about betrayal, but A Perfect Spy deepens the theme, showing how often betrayal is only the desperate search for acceptance and safety. The story of Magnus Pym and his web of relationships is not a cynical story of deception and double-crossing. It is a story of love and all of its fraught relationships, especially those between parents and children. As thrilling and intricate as it is, A Perfect Spy is also a novel of profound sadness, one that is truly heartbreaking.

The Little Drummer Girl, 1983

After completing the stunning Karla trilogy in 1979 (which made up the bulk of his ‘70s work), John Le Carre could have justifiably eased up a bit, turned back to shorter books like his ‘60s output. But no--by the 1980s Le Carre had emerged as a master novelist, and as such, published two more major works in a row, the first being 1983′s The Little Drummer Girl.

In another sign of his greatness, Le Carre abandoned the East-West/Soviet-US-UK conflict that drove all of his works to date and found a new global flashpoint on which to focus his talents. Never one to shy away from the thorniest, deadliest, most bitter and intractable conflicts, Le Carre kicked off the 1980s by wading into the bloody morass that was, is, and probably will always be the struggle of Israel-Palestine.

The result is astounding--extremely complex, yet taut and plotted with drive. The ethical ambiguities of espionage so prevalent in his earlier novels take on new dimensions when manifested in a struggle based not so much on ideologies but heritage and blood. Le Carre refuses to take sides in the novel, portraying the justifications, virtues, hypocrisies and base cruelties of both the Israelis and Palestinians. (Which of course outraged partisans on both sides. But no matter what stance you take in this conflict, you will outrage someone.)

At the center of it all is Charlie--another of Le Carre’s many characters who, somewhat unwittingly at first, are drawn into a world of espionage in which they discover themselves to be quite adept. Not long after, though, they learn that they may be adept, but they are not equipped. Of all Le Carre’s tragic figures seduced and destroyed by the dark bargains of spycraft, Charlie may be the saddest yet.

This is Le Carre’s most brutal novel to date, which is probably unavoidable, due to the subject matter, but also quite unnverving, considering the unremitting bleakness of his late ‘60s run. Yet, like all the best Le Carre, it is compelling and unforgettable. And Le Carre, far from being finished, still had an absolute masterpiece queued up next.

I’m not crazy about the design for Penguin’s trade reissues, by Buckley and Kulick with illustrations by Matthew Taylor. I hate when titles are subsumed into smaller points and shoved aside, or to the bottom, as in this case. I also dislike when text is flipped around, as is the rising-vertical “John.” However, I do find interesting Taylor’s strategy of developing an image that is either metaphorical for the novel at large, or, as in this case, an integral image from the novel itself.

I was initially ambivalent about the choice of illustration for The Little Drummer Girl, but now feel it’s one of the more effective of the line. It seems somewhat odd and innocuous at first, especially when compared with the more militaristic illustrations on the covers of the ‘80s paperback editions, but after a full reading and consideration of the novel, it takes on an appropriately ominous tone.

Le Carre’s 1980s.

During the decade in which the original Cold War began winding down, John Le Carre only published three books. (He had five in the ‘60s, and four in the ‘70s.) But two of them are some very heavy lifting.

After finishing the Karla trilogy, Le Carre didn’t ease up a bit. Moving away from the Britain/US/Russia axis, he launched into the Israel/Palestine conflict with Drummer Girl in 1983, and then followed that up with the monumental A Perfect Spy in 1986. By necessity, for both readers and writer, 1989′s The Russia House is a slighter affair, yet still prime Le Carre, with the author finally turning back to Russia, now in the uncertain early years of perestroika.

Like New Directions, Grove Press was a reliable provider of intellectual edge and cultural cool to the aspiring drug-addled intellectual of the mid-to-late 20th Century.

This title is from 1969, but that font is already careening ahead into the 1970s. And the subject matter, of course, is guaranteed edgy in any decade. Even today, a cultural history of underground film from 1969 has cache-- does “underground film” as understood in 20th Century terms even exist today?

Yet another aid to beleaguered English students from the ‘60s to the ‘80s was the University of Minnesota’s Pamphlets on American Writers series. Unlike Southern Illinois and their Crosscurrents, UM didn’t make a single design change through the entire series. This batch spans 1960-1969 and nary a font nor a bend of the border ribbon transforms.

While not as austerely forbidding as Crosscurrents, the PAWs also lack the slightly demented look of Stanley Wyatt’s 20th Century Views. All in all, they promise a solid, and mercifully brief, introduction to the author in question.

Saul Bellow doesn’t get read as much these days as he once did, but back in the mid-20th century, he was considered to be one of the, if not THE, all-time heavyweights of modern American literature.

Books like this were published pretty steadily by the highbrow private and University presses from the ‘50s to the ‘70s. Needless to say, many of them looked pretty good, regardless of one’s opinion of Bellow.

Crosscurrents, from Southern Illinois University Press, was another source of literary criticism that got students through their English courses in high school and college back in the ‘60s and ‘70s.

The series went through a couple of design changes in the course of the 1960s. In 1962, (photo 1) it went from the “crosshatch plaid” C to a solid color with a subtle texture in the background. The font also changed to a much more austere and modern sans-serif style.

In 1968, SIU Press doubled-down on stern modernism, shearing away all ornament, such as the double-logos of the crossed-C at the top and the triangle/circle at the bottom; as well as the big C itself and the author photo. Even the new font looks more serious (photo 2).

In every version, though, these cover designs indicated that heavy and deep analysis would be found inside.

In shifting styles, SIU Press did not change designers. All of these were designed by Andor Braun.

For a few generations of students, the Twentieth Century Views series from Prentice-Hall was an essential source for pulling together papers for Honors/AP English classes.

Published from the ‘60s to the ‘70s, the series featured a consistent style by illustrator/designer Stanley Wyatt. Wyatt’s woodblock-esque covers all had an air of the sinister about them, and made the literary works being analyzed  seem darker and more compelling than the covers of the books themselves often did.

Wyatt didn’t always go for the obvious work or image, either. Yes, it’s of course Moby Dick on the Melville volume, but that’s The Marble Faun on Hawthorne. Crane is The Open Boat. I am not sure about Anderson and Dreiser, James is probably either Portrait of a Lady or The Golden Bowl. Prentice-Hall was inconsistent about revealing the source of the illustration, and about crediting Wyatt.

Unfortunately, these don’t get the use they once did. I’m having to pull most of them from our library’s collection for not checking out in 5 or more years. Sorry to see them go.

Publication dates as follows: